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Keep social engineers away from Team GB

Privilege is a legitimate issue but champions do not have to apologise for their education

Ed Smith

August 6 2012, 1:01am, The Times

Just when you think there can’t possibly be a cloud on the sporting horizon, the British have found one. Lord Moynihan, head of the British Olympic Association, says it is “wholly unacceptable” that so many British medallists are privately educated. He described the fact that the private sector contributed half the country’s medals at Beijing in 2008 as “one of the worst statistics in British sport”.

The ensuing row has settled along predictable battle lines. But the debate is ill-served by the premise that there must be a single villainous force. If the choice presented is oversimplistic and binary — either private schools are wickedly hoarding opportunities for the rich and privileged, or state schools are shockingly hell-bent on eliminating the natural human desire to compete —…